I do not know Daniel Weissbort but I did know Ted Hughes. So, my reaction to these
poems is not impartial and what I like about them is the way in which they prompt my
memory and evoke the man. Anyone who knew Ted Hughes will recognize him here: his
height, his physical presence, his concentration on the task in hand, and his
generosity and concern for others: “You inserted yourself into this life or
that”, Weissbort writes in ‘Silence, Worse’, “with care,
paying attention to the surroundings / trying not to disturb them… ”. And
that was how Ted was.

As a reviewer, however, I had to ask myself how those who did not know Ted Hughes,
or any of the circumstances behind Weissbort’s poems, would react to them. So, I
took Letters To Ted to my poetry group – a bunch of ordinary Australian
women and men who write good, bad and/or indifferent poetry themselves, who know little
about Hughes apart from what I have shared with them, but all of whom love poetry in
all its forms and love to read and talk about it.

I explained, as Weissbort does in his Introduction, that he and Hughes met at
Cambridge in the early 50s and that their friendship lasted until Ted’s death in
1998. We read, too, about the beginnings of the magazine, Modern Poetry in
Translation, which Hughes suggested to Weissbort on New Year’s Eve 1963/4,
which they co-edited for a few issues, and which Weissbort still edits. Then we read
some of the Letters to Ted, each person making their own choice of poems.
Reactions (predictably) were mixed but on the whole favourable.

“He’s
very brave”, one poet said, “to write in a style that’s so similar to
Birthday Letters”. And yes, the style is simple, spare, and moving, and
the address is direct, just as it is in the poems Hughes addressed to Sylvia Plath.
“Perhaps”, I thought, “the first poem ‘Getting There’
deals with just that sort of courage”: Weissbort writes of his and Ted’s
shared dilemma of “wanting to please whoever had a claim” and of the
need, sometimes, to ignore that and “not to be afraid to
disappoint”. That, certainly, is a brave choice to make, and at the end of
the poem Weissbort sees Ted “nodding, wordlessly, / or just waiting for me to
continue”. So he does. And these letters, as Weissbort explains, are “a
sort of continuation” of the correspondence that he and Ted had over the years.
Clearly this correspondence involved both letters and conversations, and to continue
conversations with a dead friend or relative is quite a common way of coping with
grief. In that way, these poems were understood by everyone.

Yet, in spite of the informative notes at the end of the book, the very personal or
specific references in poems like ‘Betrayal?’ and ‘The Cure’,
caused puzzlement and a feeling, in some members of my group, that there was more
behind the poem than Weissbort was willing to share. And maybe there is some truth in
that, for ‘Untranslated’ begins: “Do I preserve what I know by not
transcribing you?” – as if Weissbort feared that by presenting his
memories of Ted too fully, he might somehow lose them.

Transcription and translation, however, were shared interests for Weissbort and
Hughes, and what better comment on Ted’s methods of translation could one get
than from another poet (like Weissbort) who is skilled in that art.
‘Translation’ comments on Ted’s “X-ray vision” (as
Hungarian poet Janos Csokits apparently called it) and on “how clearly [he]
heard / how vividly, vigorously” he translated. The notes to this poem throw
further light on Ted’s methods, and ‘Literalness’,
‘Narrative’ and the note to ‘A Translation’ tell more. ‘A
Hypothesis’, however, suggests that Ted’s “waxing
powers” in translation were what “did [him] in” by
demanding more and more of his energy, like being embraced by a muse with
“more limbs than Shiva”. Ted himself thought otherwise but would
probably have responded as Weissbort remembers him responding to the suggestion that he
“invented a version of Nature” ( ‘Was it Nature’):
“Maybe!”. But Ted would have enjoyed Weissbort’s final picture
of the Gods, all stirred up by Ted’s translations about them, “almost
believing in themselves”, and Ted himself, like one of his own tramps, caught
with his “swag” of translations in his hands – in fragrante
delicto.

In essence, Letters To Ted, is a very personal, loving memoir of Ted, written
by one of those “three or four” friends of whom Ted wrote in
‘Visit’ in Birthday Letters – “who stay unchanged /
Like a separate self”. Readers looking for gossip about the relationship
between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath will be disappointed. Weissbort was there at the
fateful St. Botolph’s party. Dragged there from his
“bed-of-safety” by Ted, full of cold, he was “that
red-nosed piano player” (‘St Botolph’s Review’). But his
memory of that night has, it seems, survived in far worse condition than the copies of
the St. Botolph’s Review which he recently found.

Other poems remember Cambridge University, friends, fishing expeditions, food and
laughter. But most of all, Weissbort’s poems celebrate Ted – fisherman,
pedagogue, thinker, sharer, poet. For me, the most moving poems in the book are
‘Winter is Coming in’ and ‘Your Voice in Westminster Abbey’.
The first carries (but sadly) the song of “Dick, Jack, Dan”,
adapting it to an ancient tune; the second tells simply and powerfully of the shock of
that moment in the Memorial Service when we heard and recognized Ted’s voice, and
recognized, too, his absence.